AUTHOR: Arundhati Roy is an award-winning author and an active human rights activist. Roy has personally experienced the marginalisation and discrimination in her childhood. Roy, her brother and her mother Mary Roy were marginalised by the Syrian Christian community they belonged to. They were unwelcomed by the community and the relatives for being the children of mixed religious marriage.
Arundhati Roy is an Indian author. Roy has received the Man Booker's Prize of 1997 for the novel The God of Small Things (1997). In the novel THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS (1997) Roy depicts the social discrimination of women, children, untouchables, migrants and different races. The novel provides the detailed analysis on the major and minor aspects of marginalisation highlighted in the novel The God of Small Things (1997).
Arundhati Roy said in the interview with the Hindu, “What I want to write I cannot describe. It is akin to breathing, and the air we breathe has caste, gender, Kashmir, love, animals, trees and other things. We can’t write if we are afraid, afraid of intimacy or politics, or of making the background become foreground” (See https://www.thehindu.com/…/you-cant-wri…/article19938276.ece).
NOVEL: The God of Small Things (1997) is the first award-winning novel by the Indian author Arundhati Roy. In 1992 Arundhati started working on the manuscript of her first novel The God of Small Things (1997). It is a semi-autobiographical novel. The major part is about her childhood experiences in Ayemenem. This novel was published in 1997. It received the ‘The Man Booker Prize’ in 1997 and was published in 40 languages around the world.
It was the most appreciated and the most controversial novel at the same time. Most of the novel covers Roy’s experiences and keen observation of Indian society. This novel is not linear, but it goes back and forth, present and past memories as the stream of consciousness.
Ammu’s character is not as strong as Mary Roy was in real life and so she gives up fighting the odds-on life too. Mary Roy was a Women Rights activist and a strong individual who fought for her rights and raised her children with unconventional education of humanity and feminist values outside the fixed social norms of those times. Arundhati Roy’s mother was an uncompromising feminist and a social activist.
Ammu’s character has tragic flaws, which bring the tragic fall of not only the heroine but also affects her loved ones. Ammu is vulnerable and willing to fall in love with anyone who will give her attention she has to find love outside of the community, as the community has marginalised her and her children altogether.
'The small things' are the protagonist Ammu and her Dizygotic twins Rahel, the main narrator and her brother Esthappan. According to the Syrian Christian community, as Ammu is married out of the community to a Hindu and even divorced him, she is marginal. Ammu, Rahel and Esthappen are so small things to the community that their lives do not matter to anyone except Velutha. ‘The God’ in the novel is Velutha, who himself is marginalised by Indian society as an untouchable. Velutha loves Rahel and Esthappan and their mother, Ammu without any condition. Hence he is punished and killed by the privileged community.
Estha faces the abuse at the public place and his family cannot provide protection. As his mother, Ammu says that one cannot trust anyone. As Estha is having a pragmatic approach to everything, he feels it is the best thing to be prepared for any situation. “Because Anything Can Happen to anyone,” Estha said. “It’s Best to be Prepared” (198).
Velutha is the tragic hero of the novel The God of Small Things (1997). Velutha is the son of a fisherman identified as Paravan from Kerala and is treated as untouchable not only by the Hindus but also by the Christian; though he and his father have accepted Christianity.
CONCLUSION: It is an omnipresent narrative with Rahel as the main narrator. It is the story of the fraternal twins Rahel and Esthappan, their mother Ammu and people connected to them. Roy focuses on the marginalisation of women. Marginalisation of children is shown through the main narrator Rahel and her brother Esthappan, in the novel children are denied love, care and safety by the family of their own. The powerful community marginalises Velutha for belonging to depressed classes and treated him as an untouchable.
Hi! Friends feel free to comment on your point of view on the novel. If you want more information, let me know and I'll work on it.
No comments:
Post a Comment